Denies Leaking ‘Disinformation’ Data : U.S. Employee Reassigned After Rejecting Lie Test

WASHINGTON —  The National Security Council has reassigned a State Department employee who refused to take a lie-detector test or otherwise cooperate with an FBI investigation into a leak of classified documents to the news media, Reagan Administration officials said Friday.

The investigation was touched off by a report in the Washington Post that the Administration had conducted a “disinformation” campaign, beginning with an article in the Wall Street Journal, designed to convince Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi that an American attack on his North African country was imminent.

FBI Probe Continuing

“No culpability is imputed by the member’s decision to leave the staff,” a U.S. official said. “The FBI is continuing with its investigation and, until it is complete, we will have no further information.

“The refusal to cooperate with the ongoing investigation resulted in the loss of the trust and confidence essential for any individual holding a sensitive security position,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

Officials would not name the employee, but she was identified Friday on ABC-TV’s “World News Tonight” as Elaine L. Morton, an expert on Libya and North Africa.

She told an ABC correspondent that she regarded the polygraph “as about as useful as a divining rod in telling if you were a witch in Salem.”

In an interview later with the Washington Post, she said that she refused to submit to the FBI polygraph examination as a matter of principle. She denied having been the source of stories about the controversial White House disinformation plan.

The National Security Council, whose main function is to assist the President on foreign policy and other sensitive issues, operates in virtual secrecy. The director, John M. Poindexter, rarely holds news conferences or makes public statements.

The FBI has questioned about 20 to 25 people and given polygraph tests to seven or eight council staff members, according to unidentified officials quoted in Thursday’s editions of the Washington Post.

Dan Howard, a White House spokesman, said: “Whenever there is a leak of national security information, there is an investigation.”

The Post, on Oct. 2, published a report on a three-page memo sent by Poindexter to President Reagan.

Fictitious Events

It called for a “disinformation program,” combining real and fictitious events to make Kadafi “think that there is a high degree of internal opposition to him within Libya, that his key trusted aides are disloyal, that the U.S. is about to move against him militarily.”

Administration officials denied that there had been any campaign to mislead the press. However, Secretary of State George P. Shultz quoted the admonition of Winston Churchill, the leader of Britain in World War II, that, under certain conditions, truth may be “attended by a bodyguard of lies.”